Candice Gorman discusses the plights of her clients who are locked up in the Guantanamo Bay prison, how the U.S. dropped thousands of leaflets over Afghanistan promising millions of dollars in rewards to turn in Arabs to U.S., how the U.S. labels most Gitmo prisoners as enemies of whichever state they happen to be from, the catalog of violations of the Bill of Rights, Article 1, Section 9 and other basic premises of American criminal justice, their difficulties in even getting lawyers to represent them at all, how the military force-feeds those who want to die, how they refuse to treat deathly ill prisoners who want to live, the verifiable innocence of the vast majority of Gitmo detainees past and present, Col. Moe‘s comparison of his own behavior to that of the Communist dictatorship in North Korea, the administration’s good fortune in ruling a country where only three reporters even bother covering Guantanamo at all, the classification of her notes on her client’s accusations of torture, and what you can do about it.
MP3 here. (42:35)
Candice Gorman is an attorney for two Guantanamo detainees, runs The Guantanamo Blog and has written many articles for In These Times and Huffington Post. She is the principal in the law firm of H. Candace Gorman. The firm concentrates in Civil Rights and employment litigation. The firm handles both individual and class action lawsuits for Plaintiffs under the various civil rights statutes, anti-discrimination laws and under ERISA. In 2004, Attorney Gorman argued and won a unanimous decision before the United States Supreme Court in Jones vs. R.R. Donnelley. Attorney Gorman has lectured widely on the subject of civil rights and employment litigation.
20:30 minutes in Scott Horton asks “this is not how the Americans treated actual Nazis when they were prisoners of war”. I don’t know how naive the Americans are but Dwight Eisenhower killed 1.7 million German soldiers in real death camps. They were starved to death and any American soldier caught feeding them was shot. You can watch it on Youtube simply by typing in Eisenhower death camps and see footage of American soldiers starving Germans deliberately to death.
What’s happening in Gitmo is mild compared to how Americans normally behave and leads me wonder what is actually happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.
@Tonbridge
That’s nazi nonsense.
8,000 – 40,000 german soldiers died in these camps. That’s pretty ‘good’ for prison camps with supply problems. (+about a million deaths in russian camps)
It’s not nazi nonsense. My uncle was captured by the Americans and along with 10,000 others was placed in a field with barb wire around it. When the Americans handed the POW’s(DEF’s; how convenient)over to the French, the Americans deliberately burned the red cross supplies which were meant for the German POW’s. Many were deliberately starved to death, some were so weak that they could not stand up after visiting the latrine and just fell back into the um stuff. etc.
The Americans are the biggest war criminals the world has ever seen.
Are you seriously trying to make a statement that because the US forces in Europe at the end of WWII, after helping to defeat the Nazi machine, treated captured enemy soldiers harshly (details about which are still very much open for debate), this somehow equates to the treatment of civilians and POW’s by both the Soviet and Nazi forces during the same conflict? Not only this, but are you also then stating that you believe the US forces are worse than both of these?
Your memory is pretty short and very selective.
It is difficult to see how the opinion of someone from a country whose population almost universally colluded with the Nazi regime actually matters to anyone but himself. Just because there is cause to be angered at the way US forces are being used, you cannot brush aside History and replace it with your fanciful ideas theat German forces in WWII were somehow victims.
Strong Godwin vibes, but inappropriate again.
The actual comment is totally blown out of proportion and Tonbridge has managed not to grab the essence of it. It is neither “nazi nonsense” that didn’t really happen, nor is hyperbole the way forward and the actual numbers too are part of the historical debate. http://hnn.us/articles/1266.html
But that history should have nothing to do with the intolerable lawlessness at Guantanamo, the show-trials that can’t stand the light of day, the prisoners who cannot go anywhere, the worldwide torture network etc. It should be clear to anyone that this practice eats away like a cancer at the very philosophical foundations of America and of the entire “Western world” for that matter. In the “war of ideas” (some like to talk about, everything must be a war apparently) this is the biggest defeat imaginable.
The subject of the treatment of German POWs after WWII is relevant. It shows there is nothing new in BushCheneyCo’s renaming human beings to ‘enemy combatants’ to deny them legal due process and Geneva convention protections.
When WWII ended, Patton simply turned enemy soldiers loose to fend for themselves and find their way home. By contrast Eisenhower – a man who enjoyed a mysterious ‘fast track’ career up the military ranks and – did the opposite.
Like calling a ‘pen’ a ‘doowhackey’, Eisenhower claimed that the captured German soldiers were Disarmed Enemy Forces (DEFs) and not entitled to Geneva convention protections. He rounded up a a huge number (millions) of them in open-air camps, with no shelter, sanitation or medical care.
Then, on his orders, they were starved to death.
How many died has never been accurately determined. The German government – prostate to this day – has remained silent on this issue and never investagted. Published estimates on German POW soldiers to have died in French, British and American (not Soviet) captivity range from 500,000 to 1.7 million.
To this day, it remains one of the most under-researched and underreported of the many atrocities of World War II.
Attorney Gorman is wonderful. Guantanomo must be shut down, and torture ceased. Based on all the horrifying evidence touched on by commentators and elsewhere, I hope that in the future anti-war interviewers are very careful not to generalize when comparing the way the USA government treated its foreign captives in the past to how the federalists are treating them now.
Are you kidding me, Ms. Marycatherine Barton? Guantanamo Bay is a lot like a luxury resort, a five-star hotel – THE BEST. To me, it sounds like it would make a hot vacation spot, a great tourist destination, and a great place to get a little R & R. We should all be VERY GRATEFUL to our loving government that it would go out of its way to spend our money on such beautiful facilities that we can all visit one day, if we are ever that forunate enough.